On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, announced its verdict in one of the most-watched tech feuds between billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The nine-member jury handed a decisive victory to Altman, saying Musk had waited too long to bring his claims against the artificial intelligence company and its top executives.
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit, had filed a $150bn lawsuit against the organisation, Altman and its president, Greg Brockman, accusing them of turning it into a for-profit entity for personal enrichment.
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The verdict, however, stopped short of resolving the central question at the heart of the case, whether OpenAI betrayed the nonprofit mission on which it was founded in 2015 as it transformed from a research lab focused on benefitting humanity into one of the world’s most powerful AI companies.
Instead, the case became focused on a procedural issue. After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury unanimously found that the statute of limitations had expired before Musk filed the lawsuit in 2024, meaning jurors concluded he had waited too long to bring his claims under the applicable legal deadline. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the finding and dismissed the case.
The ruling removes a major legal threat for OpenAI at a pivotal moment for the company, which is deepening its commercial partnerships, expanding its relationship with Microsoft and moving towards what could become one of the largest public offerings in Silicon Valley history; while for Musk, the ruling leaves room to argue that the case was lost on timing rather than substance.
Shortly after the verdict, Musk repeated his accusations on X. “Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!” Musk wrote on X. “Creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”
Musk has decided to appeal, ensuring that the increasingly bitter feud between two of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures is unlikely to end any time soon.
Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Brockman and other researchers at a time when concerns were growing over how AI could reshape society.
The idea, according to testimony and internal discussions presented during the trial, was that the company could focus on building safe AI systems that benefitted humanity rather than prioritising shareholder returns.
Musk and Altman also believed the nonprofit structure would help OpenAI compete with technology giants such as Google by attracting top researchers and positioning the organisation as a mission-driven alternative.
Musk claims he contributed roughly $38m to OpenAI during its early years, but relations between the founders later deteriorated sharply. He resigned from OpenAI’s board in February 2018, officially citing potential conflicts of interest as Tesla became more focused on AI.
But the split deepened after OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary and Microsoft invested heavily in the company. Microsoft has since committed tens of billions of dollars to its partnership with OpenAI, helping transform ChatGPT into one of the defining products of the global AI boom.
Musk became increasingly critical of the company, arguing that OpenAI had moved far beyond the nonprofit vision on which it was founded. In 2023, he launched a rival AI company, xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, before filing his lawsuit against OpenAI the following year.
At the centre of the trial was a relatively technical legal question about when Musk became aware that OpenAI was moving towards a profit-driven structure.
Because the lawsuit was filed in 2024, Musk needed to convince jurors that the alleged wrongdoing occurred within the legal time limit for bringing his claims.
Musk argued that his concerns fully crystallised only in 2023, particularly after Microsoft’s big investments into OpenAI’s for-profit arm.
But OpenAI’s lawyers argued that Musk had known for years that the company planned to pursue a commercial structure and raise huge amounts of outside funding.
Evidence presented during the trial showed that discussions about creating a for-profit arm dated back to at least 2017. Jurors also heard testimony that Altman had sent Musk documents in 2018 outlining plans for OpenAI to raise billions of dollars through a for-profit structure.
Ultimately, the jury sided with OpenAI’s argument that Musk could have filed his lawsuit much earlier – and therefore waited too long.
That meant jurors never had to answer the more explosive question at the centre of the case about whether OpenAI had actually betrayed its founding mission.
OpenAI maintained throughout the trial that there was never an agreement to remain a nonprofit indefinitely. Its lawyers argued that Musk understood from the beginning that developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence would require extraordinary levels of funding and computing power.
OpenAI also portrayed Musk’s lawsuit as partly motivated by rivalry. By the time the case reached court, Musk’s xAI had emerged as a direct competitor to OpenAI in the race to develop advanced AI systems.
Meanwhile, OpenAI had become one of the most powerful companies in the technology industry, reportedly valued at more than $800bn and moving towards what could eventually become one of the largest public offerings in history.
Lawyers for OpenAI argued that Musk became hostile only after losing influence within the company and watching Altman turn OpenAI into the dominant force in generative AI.
Although the verdict was a clear legal victory for OpenAI, the trial never became the sweeping test case about the future of artificial intelligence that many had expected.
Because the case was resolved on procedural grounds, the court did not answer some of the biggest questions raised by the AI boom: how these systems should be governed, who should benefit economically from them, and whether companies developing increasingly powerful AI tools can still claim to act in the public interest while pursuing enormous commercial growth.
The trial also touched only briefly on broader concerns surrounding AI development, including transparency, labour and the extraction of data used to train AI systems.
Nicole Turner Lee, director of the Centre for Technology Innovation, told Al Jazeera that one of the central problems surrounding AI is that the technology is deeply “extractive”.
“It does undergo theft where people do not consent as to whether or not their information, their image, their voice, their text are actually being extracted,” she said, raising concerns about compensation and consent in AI training systems.
Those issues remained largely outside the scope of the trial due to it ultimately centring on procedural issues.
The ruling, therefore, also removed the possibility of a far more disruptive outcome that could have threatened OpenAI’s corporate structure, its partnership with Microsoft and the wider wave of investment pouring into the AI industry.
But the broader debate over AI’s future is far from settled. With Musk preparing an appeal, the courtroom battle between the two former allies looks set to continue alongside wider questions about how AI should be governed.
A jury on Monday rejected Elon Musk’s claims against Sam Altman and OpenAI (OPENAI) following less than two hours of deliberations, ending a high-profile legal battle between the tech billionaires, according to media reports.
The nine-person jury unanimously found that
By AFP, Reuters and The Associated Press
Published On 12 May 202612 May 2026
In a United States court, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has rejected claims from fellow tech mogul Elon Musk that he betrayed the artificial intelligence company’s original vision.
Tuesday marked the start of Altman’s testimony in a contentious trial unfolding in Oakland, California, between some of tech’s richest and most powerful titans.
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Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, has sued Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman on the basis that they “stole a charity” by shifting its purpose.
He alleged that OpenAI’s leader persuaded him to invest $38bn, based on a goal of improving humanity, only to see the company pivot to a for-profit venture in 2019.
On the witness stand on Tuesday, Altman instead framed Musk as a competitor obsessed with exercising control over OpenAI.
“It does not fit with my conception of the words ‘stealing a charity’ to look at what has actually happened here,” Altman told the court.
The two men have long had an acrimonious relationship, driven in part by differing views about artificial intelligence.
Musk — a self-described free speech “absolutist” — currently runs his own AI chatbot, Grok, which has been accused of perpetuating right-wing conspiracy theories and offensive materials.
He is seeking $150bn in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, one of its principal investors.
Altman’s testimony comes more than two weeks into the trial, which has seen him and Musk square off against each other.
In his testimony, Altman argued that Musk knew of the plans to develop OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise when he invested, and he asserted that Musk even petitioned to have a majority stake in the company.
“An early number that Mr Musk threw out was that he should have 90 percent of the equity to start,” Altman told the jury. “It then softened, but it always was a majority.”
The outcome of the trial could determine the future of OpenAI, its leadership, and products like ChatGPT. As part of his lawsuit, Musk is pushing for the removal of Altman and Brockman.
The trial comes as OpenAI prepares for a potential initial public offering that could see it valued at $1 trillion, a historically large sum.
During earlier testimony, Musk portrayed Altman as a liar who could not be trusted with the development of the technology.
“If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI, I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world,” Musk said.
Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, also sought to undermine Altman’s reliability during questioning on Tuesday.
“Have you misled people when you do business?” Molo asked Altman.
“I do not think so,” Altman replied.
Altman, meanwhile, sought to cast doubt on Musk’s leadership; Musk ultimately left OpenAI’s board in 2018 to pursue his own AI development.
“I don’t think Mr Musk understood how to run a good research lab,” Altman said. “He had demotivated some of our most key researchers.”
The US public, for its part, has been largely unconvinced by high-minded rhetoric about the transformative potential of AI.
A March 2026 poll by the Pew Research Center suggested that a majority of respondents in the US believe AI will worsen, rather than improve, the ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, make difficult decisions, and solve problems.
Just 10 percent of respondents said they were more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life.
But the industry has been quick to translate its substantial economic power into political influence as lawmakers consider how best to regulate the technology.
The use of AI has emerged as an election-season issue as the US midterms approach in November, and the administration of President Donald Trump has proposed a “national policy framework” for the technology to avoid a patchwork of state regulations.
The AI industry has become a driver of eye-watering investment in recent years, with the United Nations estimating that the global market could be worth $4.8 trillion by 2033.
WASHINGTON — The chair of the House Oversight Committee has sent a letter to OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman requesting information about potential conflicts of interest between Altman’s personal investments and his operation of the company.
The letter, sent Friday, comes amid a high-stakes legal battle currently playing out in an Oakland federal courtroom between one-time partners Altman and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who in 2015 co-founded the AI company best known for creating ChatGPT.
The company was first established solely as a non-profit corporation and the letter sent to Altman by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Republican chair of the Oversight committee, indicates that the committee is “investigating potential conflicts of interest involving capital from nonprofit corporations invested in startups and other for-profit companies.”
Comer has requested by May 22 a briefing from the company official responsible for oversight of potential conflicts involving company officers and directors, including Altman, as well as all documents related to conflict of interest policies and guidance for those executives.
While OpenAI was created as a non-profit designed to responsibly harness the power of the emerging artificial intelligence technology, the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 and three years later released ChatGPT, which jumpstarted widespread adoption of the technology.
Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, left Open AI’s board in 2018, one year before the creation of the for-profit arm. He is arguing that Altman and another co-founder, Greg Brockman, betrayed the original mission of the non-profit organization, driven by their desire to “cash in” on the technology.
Musk added Microsoft, a significant investor in OpenAI, to the lawsuit in 2024. OpenAI is rumored to be gearing up to go public later this year or early next, and was recently valued at $852 billion.
Musk has said that he invested $38 million in the OpenAI non-profit, but he does not stand to benefit from a potential OpenAI public offering.
He created a rival company xAI in 2023 that was later folded into his company SpaceX
In the lawsuit, Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages, for Altman to be removed from the company and for the company to be fully returned to its non-profit status.
Musk’s complaint also alleges that Altman engaged in self-dealing by directing OpenAI to pursue deals with companies in which he also held a personal stake, including nuclear fusion power company Helion.
Comer’s letter cites reporting that Altman’s pursuit of a Helion deal, which is still ongoing, would come at a lofty valuation of the power-company, boosting the company’s worth, and the value of Altman’s investment.
Altman was briefly forced to step down from leadership of OpenAI in 2023 in part due to concerns about potential conflicts between his personal investments and his operation of the company, but was soon reinstated.
While the company’s board created an audit committee to investigate the potential conflicts of Altman and other officers, the findings were never disclosed.
Comer has requested that Altman turn over all documents and communication related to that audit committee.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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OpenAI (OPENAI) President Greg Brockman told a federal court on Tuesday that Elon Musk’s apparent lack of knowledge about AI made OpenAI’s early leadership leery about giving him control of the company.
“Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars,” Brockman said,
The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI, and jury selection starts on Monday.
Published On 27 Apr 202627 Apr 2026
Technology tycoons Elon Musk and Sam Altman are poised to face off in a high-stakes trial revolving around the alleged betrayal, deceit and unbridled ambition that blurred the bickering billionaires’ once-shared vision for the development of artificial intelligence.
The trial, which is scheduled to begin on Monday with jury selection, centres on the 2015 birth of ChatGPT maker OpenAI as a nonprofit start-up primarily funded by Musk before evolving into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852bn.
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The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI, breakthrough technology that is increasingly being feared as a potential job killer and an existential threat to humanity’s survival.
Those perceived risks are among the reasons that Musk, the world’s richest person, has cited for filing a lawsuit in August 2024 that will now be decided by a jury and US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California.
The civil lawsuit accuses Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and his top lieutenant and a cofounder, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company’s founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a revolutionary technology. The lawsuit alleges they shifted OpenAI into moneymaking mode behind his back.
The bitter legal fight may come down to a few pages in one executive’s personal diary.
“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon,” wrote Brockman in the autumn of 2017. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick?”
Brockman’s diary entry is part of the thousands of pages of internal documents revealed in court.
Musk said the defendants kept him in the dark about their plans, exploited his name and financial support to create a “wealth machine” for themselves, and owe damages for having conned him and the public.
He also wants OpenAI to revert to a nonprofit, for Altman and Brockman to be removed as officers and for Altman to be removed from its board.
OpenAI has brushed off Musk’s allegations as an unfounded case of sour grapes that’s aimed at undercutting its rapid growth and bolstering Musk’s own xAI, which he launched in 2023 as a competitor.
The trial also carries risks for Musk, who last month was held liable by another jury for defrauding investors during his $44bn takeover of Twitter in 2022. Any damaging details about Musk and his business tactics could be particularly hurtful now because his rocket ship maker, SpaceX, plans to go public this summer in an initial public offering that could make him the world’s first trillionaire.
Musk fraud claims against Altman, OpenAI dismissed
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Some of our finest contemporary writers got their laurels Friday night at the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.
At the awards ceremony, which opens the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books weekend, Oakland-born writer Amy Tan and literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books received achievement honors, and finalists in 13 other categories became prize winners.
The presenters and awardees who took the stage balanced a spirit of playfulness — Times senior editor Sophia Kercher called the weekend’s festival “my personal Coachella” and Times columnist LZ Granderson saluted his fellow “booktroverts” — and one of reverence as they celebrated writing as an instrument for advocacy, imagination and history-keeping.
As Bench Ansfield virtually accepted his award in the history category for “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,” which exposes a pattern of landlords setting residential fires to collect insurance payouts, he said, “It’s a scary time to be a historian in the United States.”
“Our field, like so many other fields, is under attack,” Ansfield said. “To understand the crises in front of us, we have to understand our history.”
Among the crises highlighted was AI encroachment, the subject of science and technology category winner Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” The AI expert and investigative journalist’s book is a critical investigation into the rise of OpenAI and its impact on society.
In Hao’s acceptance speech, read by presenter Jia-Rui Cook in her absence, the author said she “can’t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the day.”
“That said, I have never been more hopeful of our chance to advance a different future,” the author said, adding that L.A.’s history of resistance movements — including the recent Hollywood strikes — made it an apt place to accept her award.
“Gatherings like this are one of many radical acts of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of our meaning and our humanity,” Hao said. “Let us continue to resist defiantly together and let us remember lessons in history: When people rise, empires always fall.”
Tan echoed Hao’s sentiments as she accepted the Robert Kirsch Award, which celebrates literature with regional and thematic connections to the Western United States, for her acclaimed portfolio of writing exploring identity and cultural inheritance — often through the lens of the immigrant experience.
In her speech, “The Joy Luck Club” writer said that while she never particularly considered herself a “political writer,” her stance on that has changed as government actions have made her think critically about her own identities.
“My birthright and that of millions of others is now being argued before the Supreme Court, and no matter what the outcome is, it’s been a kick in the gut to know that those in the highest echelons of government and those who support them believe that we don’t belong.”
As an author, Tan said, “I imagine the lives of the people I write about,” and that act of compassion, for writers, inherently “reflects our politics and our beliefs. And so yes, I am a political writer.”
Later, Caroline Richmond, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, celebrated the work of her nonprofit — the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award — which has made it so her daughter “has never really had to look that far to find herself on the page.”
Still, she said ongoing book bans are threatening those strides toward a more diverse literary marketplace.
“The work is very much far from over,” Richmond said, “but I have to remind myself that the people banning books are never the good guys in history, and it’s up to us in this room and beyond — as readers, as book lovers — to fight back because diverse books, we really need them now more than ever.”
As the ceremony wore on, the room was as charged with celebration as it was with resistance.
When writer-editor and former child actor Adam Ross accepted the Christopher Isherwood Prize for “Playworld,” a semi-autobiographical novel about a teen growing up in 1980s New York, he gleamed with joy about his second novel being out in the world and finding readers.
“When it became clear to me that I was writing something that was going to be a lot bigger and take a lot longer than I planned, I promised myself I would use all of my ability to capture my experience of a particular era in an enduringly magical city, and to hopefully express it in such a way that any reader willing to embark on a journey with me, but upon finishing close the book and say, ‘Yes, I know exactly what that was like,’” Ross said in his acceptance speech.
“Winning this award makes me feel like I succeeded in that endeavor,” the author said.
Other winners included Ekow Eshun, who topped the biography category for “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them,” which parses Black masculinity as embodied by various civil rights activists, philosophers and other visionaries, and Bryan Washington, who accepted the fiction award for “Palaver,” which details the tense reunion of a Jamaican-born mother and her queer son, who are navigating years of estrangement in Tokyo.
The 31st annual L.A. Times Festival of Books will host 500-plus authors and celebrities and 300-plus exhibitors across more than 200 events including panels, book signings and cooking demonstrations. Top-billed guests include musician-memoirist Lionel Richie, veteran actor and recent Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award honoree Sarah Jessica Parker, and the mastermind behind “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David.
The schedule for the Saturday-Sunday event can be found here.
Here’s the full list of finalists and winners for the Book Prizes.
Amy Tan
We Need Diverse Books
Adam Ross, “Playworld: A Novel”
Andy Anderegg, “Plum”
Krystelle Bamford, “Idle Grounds: A Novel”
Addie E. Citchens, “Dominion: A Novel”
Justin Haynes, “Ibis: A Novel” | WINNER
Saou Ichikawa translated by Polly Barton, “Hunchback: A Novel”
Molly Jong-Fast (narrator), Matie Argiropoulos (producer); “How to Lose Your Mother”
Jason Mott, Ronald Peet, and JD Jackson (narrators), Diane McKiernan (producer); “People Like Us: A Novel”
James Aaron Oh (narrator), Linda Korn (producer); “The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel”
Imani Perry (narrator), Suzanne Mitchell (producer); “Black in Blues”
Maggi-Meg Reed, Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler, Steve West, and Jim Seybert (narrators), Kelly Gildea (producer); “The Correspondent: A Novel” | WINNER
Joe Dunthorne, “Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance”
Ekow Eshun, “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them” | WINNER
Ruth Franklin, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank”
Beth Macy, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America”
Amanda Vaill, “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution”
Jeanne Carstensen, “A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis”
Stefan Fatsis, “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary”
Brian Goldstone, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” | WINNER
Gardiner Harris, “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World”
Tod Goldberg, “Only Way Out: A Novel”
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
Mia McKenzie, “These Heathens: A Novel”
Andrés Felipe Solano translated by Will Vanderhyden, “Gloria: A Novel”
Bryan Washington, “Palaver: A Novel” | WINNER
Eagle Valiant Brosi, “Black Cohosh”
Jaime Hernandez, “Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection” | WINNER
Michael D. Kennedy, “Milk White Steed”
Lee Lai, “Cannon”
Carol Tyler, “The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief”
Char Adams, “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore”
Bench Ansfield, “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City” | WINNER
Jennifer Clapp, “Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters”
Eli Erlick, “Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950”
Aaron G. Fountain Jr., “High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America”
Megan Abbott, “El Dorado Drive” | WINNER
Ace Atkins, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World: A Novel”
Lou Berney, “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family”
Michael Connelly, “The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel”
S.A. Cosby, “King of Ashes: A Novel”
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “The New Economy”
Chet’la Sebree, “Blue Opening: Poems”
Richard Siken, “I Do Know Some Things”
Devon Walker-Figueroa, “Lazarus Species: Poems”
Allison Benis White, “A Magnificent Loneliness” | WINNER
Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
Jordan Kurella, “The Death of Mountains”
Nnedi Okorafor, “Death of the Author: A Novel”
Adam Oyebanji, “Esperance”
Silvia Park, “Luminous: A Novel” | WINNER
Mariah Blake, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals”
Peter Brannen, “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World”
Karen Hao, “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” | WINNER
Laura Poppick, “Strata: Stories from Deep Time”
Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World”
K. Ancrum, “The Corruption of Hollis Brown”
Idris Goodwin, “King of the Neuro Verse”
Jamie Jo Hoang, “My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser”
Trung Le Nguyen, “Angelica and the Bear Prince” | WINNER
Hannah V. Sawyerr, “Truth Is: A Novel in Verse”